


orange blossom water and pomegranate seeds

by handschuhmaus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, I don't know how that is plausible when the two major Force user groups are Horrible, I will drag the Sith kicking and screaming, Jedi bashing, Ohana means family and family means no one gets left behind, Personal Growth, Redemption, alternate universe to an alternate universe - Here be much canon divergence, astronomy metaphors, especially related to gravity, honestly there's more philosophy and building stuff than kicking and screaming, humanist themes I guess, in which the Sith bear some resemblance to Discworld witches, morality isn't the force, on that note although idk how much there will actually be yet, one openly so and revelling in it, personal fic fix-it, possibly Bane-ish reconsideration of Baneite dicta, potential exometeorological inaccuracies, sometimes my hp villain feels get all over my Sith feels and I'm okay with that, sometimes ridiculously fluffy, the other claiming to be So good but actually stagnant and breeding quiet horrors, this is decidedly autumnal in a way I can't explain well, to redemption (albeit without mystical means)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-07-16 00:54:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16074977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: a dent-de-lioun fix-it/remixDarth Sidious and the Persephone motífAnd tragedy averted.Some part of Palpatine says "be noble" to Damask's "we must be crude", and it's far from an easy path.But it's not a bad one.





	orange blossom water and pomegranate seeds

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [dent-de-lioun](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14061945) by [handschuhmaus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus). 
  * Inspired by [a life of smoke and silvered glass](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11457669) by [dirgewithoutmusic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic). 



> What  
> Safer than home  
> And whose  
> Cold heart  
> Do I  
> Do I owe, owe?  
> -This is Deer Country, "Small Game"
> 
> _(incidentally, the song quoted similarly in dent-de-lioun is called "Daylily King"_
> 
> * * *
> 
> I can't leave well enough alone
> 
> Or rather, I find myself needing the _birth-pangs_ -painful road to actual happiness AU.

5.4 There is something in humans that tends to prefer planets with a considerable axial tilt. It lends the place seasons, defines astronomical solstices and equinoxes. And people have often celebrated the dark winter solstice with the fruit in season then in the warmer regions: citrus, bright as the winter sun, acid and sparkling, and taking a long time to mature...

_rewind._

* * *

_one and two are in[dent-de-lioun](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14061945/chapters/32394426)_

**three (1)**

oh you fall towards the irresistible gravity of the black hole that is the Force

and the destruction it is recking resonates with an inner wildness, or even that conviction that you are profoundly _wrong_ by the standards of civilized beings (for which the Jedi are shorthand), just as Damask has said.

this seems almost _right_ , proper and fitting, and yet you resist.

It is not impossible to orbit a black hole, if you are beyond that absolute fence they call the event horizon. And black holes, you remember from a lecture you had peevishly paid all sorts of attention to, do not _suck_ , as human experience would suggest a vacuum does, but warp the fabric of the galaxy.

But so, they said, does everything else.

**three (2)**

branches that bend often don't break, and there is something in you that is like a restorative force, like springing back into readiness. Pieces may snap off and you may have bent far, but some _inner core_ defies the storm that is also within you.

Hasn't someone said that any plant is good for something?

You have been a spoiled child even so (too sweet and too bitter) and you ask Damask if it must go that way—

and you don't quite listen to (even though you _do_ hear) the Force that rings in you, because that is not your whole

(because _be better_. be better than him, your father. _never_ again be dominated, by anyone. and the solution to that might be to be at the top (and the gravity of all the bottom, all the rest, drags you down and suffocates and near destroys and you cannot stay) but it might also be to let everyone be equal measures powerful and impotent towards you, even as that seems more daunting and less real than the enormous task of amassing political power when you are so unpopular.)

And he rejects you. Or maybe just rebuffs the request.

But you seek him out and ask again.

Again, rejection.

And something drives you to look up things on the holonet and even discreetly in the libraries in this planet where you have been sent, things you would not have read otherwise, and you realize the inconceivable, and you name Cosinga's sin that has dogged you all your days, name it

_psychological and physical abuse_

a day after this settles it occurs to you that people, _normal_ people (not Cosinga's normal, but... on the bell curve of society) don't tolerate this and you try to talk to Vidar Kim, who, after all, has been supportive.

But you do it via message relay and he doesn't respond and you don't quite know why.

You ask the Force about this, more as a formality for the sake of curiousity, but if you hear anything back, it is only a gentle and mocking laughter that merely echoes annoyingly.

So you ask Damask yet again, if there isn't another way.

(And Plagueis, for all that he has been immersed in hatred and ruthless ambition for most of his life, is not heartless. Rather he has three of the visceral, bloody genuine article.)

_It won't be easy. It will be tremendously hard and against your nature as well as mine,_ he says

(Hego Damask is a scientist, if one near devoid of, unbothered by, ethical principals, as much as a Sith, and a banker as well, and the idea of an experiment, a caper, a heist of you as utterly willing, co-conspiring valuables to be delivered to the free galaxy, seems to excite him.)

But _yes._

**eight (1)**

Here is another loving child of Tatooine; it seems odd that such a desiccated world produces Skywalkers so generous in their affection but you suppose that is the way of it: where there is only just enough to survive you don't begrudge your neighbours a share.

But it is a different Tatooine than some four or five decades ago and you are both more and less alone than in past years. Damask often drank a little too much and even he is succumbing to the ravages of time, never leaving Sojourn these days. And your stolen Jedi, hard gems in his eyes but mirroring your fire for a galaxy renewed, is aging. So, you suppose, are you. And Shmi, a lined face etched by hard work and twin suns but also by smiles and laughs and mundane frustrations or worries like a teenager who flies too fast. Luke is a boy after your own heart, even if you share no taste in weather. Because they have become your family, like Mina's Eberon and Corinel and the rest.

For all your age, you like the cool and the cold now, perennial sweaters and heavy robes and shedding these when the temperature edges into warmth, thrilling in a brisk wind. Tatooine is sun and sand and almost everywhere hot enough to make even the most leisurely walk draw perspiration, though the thirsty air does drink that up, unlike on some worlds. It is not all that Luke has known; Anakin is far too restless to be content with setting up on some remote rim planet and Padmé Naberrie, who may never be queen again, is nevertheless still ambitious. They spend time on your (and Padmé's) watery home planet, to which you do not return, and beautiful Alderaan, because the queen's husband was made Leia's godparent, as Beru Lars is Luke's (is almost but not quite family; Shmi the closest thing Owen Lars has to a mother). But it is not just their home to which Luke is drawn, but the blossoming education system and the work yet to be done here and the canyons perfect for podracing.

The boy has career ambitions: a part time pilot and a teacher, giving people the means to learn and write the stories he so loves. And as soon as he competes in the festival podrace (purely for fun, no bets above 3 credits allowed), you will be taking him, and Shmi, and the Larses (if they can come), to another planet, to Serenno in autumn with golden hillsides, to be hosted by Dooku and Qui-Gon and students they have taken on, not to make seditious Jedi, but to help people deal with and make use of their Force sensitivity. For you that has never been an easy road to walk; the singularity does not preserve information quite as humans do, and cannot well be taught philosophy, nor even less comprehend how you struggle with it. But the Skywalkers, from Anakin on if not even Shmi, are Force-touched, even if Luke will be neither Jedi nor Sith, exactly. 

Leia, indeed, is more like the fabric of which recent Sith have been cut, and you approve of her education on Alderaan and sometimes Tatooine rather than highly politicized Naboo. Both of them you see as the closest thing you have to grandchildren (with Maul, it is complicated, and it seems most are disinclined to acknowledge claims of human kinship) but there is still tension between you and Amidala, in whose eyes you are apostate and even perhaps evil wizard. Curiously enough, despite superstition, Beru on the contrary actually approves of you, and to Queen Breha of Alderaan you are equal in stature to Dooku. You, his acknowledged equal and fond companion, but also heretic and protege to a Sith.

**eight (2)**

Luke doesn't win the race; true to his compassionate nature, he halts on a fairly inaccessible stretch of track to aid a wounded fellow whose pod threatens to go up in flames. Obi-Wan Kenobi looks on with an arrogant and even disappointed air; he does not quite understand compassion that defers one's own goals. His once teacher Qui-Gon you understand well, even if the two of you seem as different as dogs and cats and at once as like as two beans. But Qui-Gon (says Dooku, now, and again, and ever) has never quite been the proper Jedi, never quite submitted himself to the pruning the Order demands, only a sort of shaping while retaining a fierce and generous love you almost know as experience. 

And yet you relate as well to the idea of flaying yourself open for restructuring according to a merciless mode, even if you, akin to what Luke is doing, left through the hole in the wall, the gate in the fence, and abandoned that race. "That's what he does," you say to Kenobi, leaving the window for pleasantries open as you had with Gardulla before.

The man's arms are folded superciliously into the sleeves of his long robe, which are barely wide enough for this. "I don't know why he doesn't want to be a Jedi, and yet he can't be, too old," Kenobi grumbles off-handedly. Luke, Force-touched, is an object of much Jedi desire, but like you he bows away for his own path, beaming like Qui-Gon up at the chaotic, greedy tsunami of the accretion disc his claimant is bending fate for (or is it the flux of dangerous stellar particles, deadened for all else by atmosphere and magnetic shielding?)

"Perhaps," Shmi adds in, grinning with her pride over Luke, "you need to learn to bend a little, Master Jedi."

* * *

5.3 The autumnal equinox marks the midpoint of the shortening of days and often the beginning of the close of the harvest; the vernal equinox is halfway through the lengthening, and may mark the beginning of the growing season.

**four (1)**

Cosinga is not dead and you are finally twenty one years of age and yet you have not been bound to the strictures of Naboo these last long four years, because uncharacteristically Hego Damask has secretly financed the shake up of the Naboo legal system that is the concept of _emancipated minors_

All the same, this is the long, cold and lonely winter. Technically so, and not; you are with Damask on the Muun's home planet Mygeeto, and it is not a temperate planet but a frozen one. Yes, here and there and now in the village where Damask lives the ice melts enough to show the rock beneath, but Mygeeto's seasons, such as they are, have little to distinguish them and you're fairly certain it isn't "winter" here and now. Then again, you are in the ice world's "tropics."

Everything is bitter greens and grain and roots others would associate with northern climes, but it is not _bad._ And Damask wishes to pull you towards the dark, because it is what he knows, what he selfishly loves.

Yet yours is not the absolute dark of the void but the star flecked chamber of the galaxy, surrounded by points of light, by massive life-giving globes of plasma in fusion.

**four (2)**

You have been bought and you have also given yourself to Damask, in that you eat of his food, even drink of his wine (but his own overindulgences are a better preventative than any educational seminar you experienced, and you don't entirely love the idea of losing your wits to drink, so the most you get is tipsy) and owe him. 

Like the harvest's daughter condemned the world to winter in the myth, by dining with the king of the underworld. But you are not the harvest's daughter; yours is a strange and feral sort of temperament, that quickly harkens to Damask and yet shies from his barbarism. Death, in itself, you think, is not evil, and nor is Damask, inherently.

In fact, only a month in, he gingerly ruffled your hair, as if expecting the impulse to affection to be denied, and you certainly didn't lean into it at first, but now, now after four years, he routinely offers you hugs, a soothing embrace into clothing that typically smells of his lab, and you realize Hego Damask, Darth Plagueis, is a more fitting father for you than Cosinga. He listens, sometimes arguing, but he does, and he actually _likes_ you, won't disown you, bears your faults. He's clueless about speeder racing but follows your lead to try to enthuse appropriately, and the only caution he's given you about speeders is concern for your own safety.

He tells you the Sith code, but you think on it for a day and audaciously come back with the view that he and his tradition have been reading it the wrong way, in fact in the worst way possible.

You say that they say history is written by the victors, but (thinking on your father, on doing anything possible and often horrid to win), you propose writing a new historical tradition, in accordance with the breaking of chains, where the victors are remembered by the people they used and even destroyed in their quests. It is arrogant of you; you are no hero, but now with Damask hosting you, finding you interesting and even worthy of that rare affection he otherwise extends largely to laboratory experiments, you feel perhaps you can afford to be good, the philosopher's good, not the politicians'. 

You will never take up the dirty game of politics and Darth Plagueis has not forced your hand, but he does, laughing, call you Lady Sidious (for the way you insist gently on upending his Sith education and goals and together learning ethics, morals, how the galaxy might be made better, and perhaps someday no child know such a household tyrant as you did.) and eat with you, a significant unbending in a Muun.

It is not Damask's fault, when, at the age of twenty-one, the title of parent is bestowed upon you with the gift of a tiny red Zabrak from a frazzled mother caught in an ugly game of power. He does not quite look human, of course, and his tiny horns scratch your collarbone as he squirms, but you defer the impulse to find him another and better caregiver, challenging yourself to defy Cosinga's legacy. He has been given the name Maul, and Hego Damask is surprisingly happy to play grandfather, excepting the particularly messy bits.

**six (1)**

Maul departs from Mygeeto, _to find my brothers, my kin, see what I can do there,_ and you don't know whether your heart is breaking out of pride or of the ache of losing a child from your best to adulthood.

But there is Anakin, with unruly curls and droid grease perpetually smeared over his fingers, throwing minor insults in the Huttese he somehow still learned at Hego Damask when he doesn't enjoy the lessons the Muun sets him. Who regularly comes to your apartment in search of any culinary experiment or even just a session in a speeder, or one of the snowmobiles of Mygeeto, driving a little too fast. The boy is engineer and diplomat (couldn't help that with whatever you are as Sith in his life) simultaneously and breaks down over a rushed introduction to vector calculus that confused curl and divergence in _your_ dining room over a plate of the lentils Shmi has taught you to make from a Tatooine recipe. And you embrace him as he needs and impart dim recollections of definitions (you never use it, but you never hated math, and Damask, Muun that he is, adores it, though not necessarily the most Muun-favored parts, so you shared that).

And there are, now, former masters Dooku and Qui-Gon (and perhaps the latter's padawan, though not yet). Dooku is quiet and subtle except when impassioned and ascends rapidly to the top of your list of favorite people to talk politics with; he is heretic and aristocrat and you do not mind at all—you are in some measure both, but you would both like to see the Republic change from this stagnant state and even, you daresay, the downfall of the current Jedi order, though not, now, through the violent ends generations of Sith have imagined, only dissolution and impotence. You are the low rumble of thunder and lightning together and this is a mutual adoration poets do not speak of because there is passion only towards this other end here and yet within days of meeting him you would defend him side by side.

Qui-Gon immediately gives you the thorough embrace you hadn't known you wanted, with only the slightest questioning look for permission. But this is his affection for the galaxy at large, and he isn't asking you to consider him romantically, or any such thing. He brings you plants, a desert aloe that soothes burns, herbs for cooking and a pepper plant Anakin quickly approves of, and he makes you tea with an adorable stray cat on his shoulder and you find him surprisingly understanding about things you weren't expecting. About not wanting the family most of the galaxy says you ought to, only the found one you have made, and about being a "daughter" but feeling at home among neither men nor women, only as the family member you are to your people. He has shared your newfound love for his teacher and quickly grows fond of Anakin, as natural as a cat playing in catnip. But he is not without regrets and bizarre as it is to you, he finds you and your hard-fought drastically philanthropic neutrality startling and worthy of emulation, this no-longer-Jedi who loves so easily.

**six (2)**

You get a holonet message from someone professing to be your younger sister Mina and asking you to go to a planet known for its unusual weather and seasons. Dooku volunteers to accompany you, with the excuse that he is curious about the planet, Athyssōn, to which he has never been.

Mina was the sibling you were closest to, even though you've a brother nearer in age, and you never even bothered much to know Sybil, younger than both of you, or the other, even younger, three children Cosinga had had with your mother and also proceeded to consider more to his liking than you. 

Here there are children, your niece and nephew, she calls Eberon and Corinel, for moons named for literary plays, and once more you know the joy of holding a child and knowing that this tiny, helpless being will entrust you with its trust and new mint love so long as you do it no injury. There is no father--that is, there is no father present here, not the story Shmi tells which you would like to but cannot quite swear you believe. Perhaps Cosinga would have done a little better by you had he not been unused to infants; you are quite certain no newborn child could really look up at an adult with hatred, even if you are prepared to acknowledge that the bond is not always instant.

And it occurs to you that under any other circumstances, people would likely expect you and one of the former Jedi, the men in your life, to wed, to have a conventional family, but that seems like nothing you want, and perhaps Yan picks up on this, because he extends a finger to the tiny hand and _beams_ , saying "Do not let the Jedi take them. If they must be, I will train them." And even so, even though you do not wish to be married, the wind is rustling the leaves in the branches outside the open window of the nursery and for this perfect moment you, gaping and tattered flaw you always thought you were, are _filled_ with love for these people beside you: sister, niblings, beloved friend; this beautiful place new to you and all the family (Damask and Maul and the Skywalkers and perhaps even others) far away, whom you have found. It is not as if the heavens hang still but as if they chime pure and sweet that this is the heady and glorious track of life itself.

**seven**

Shmi returns to Tatooine in Anakin's seventeenth year (it seems, a pivotal one for both of you), and Magister Hego Damask returns to Naboo, in company of Chairman San Hill ("you've changed the Magister!" he, half-raised by Hego, always says to you) and Anakin Skywalker, as tourist, on a business trip for Damask Holdings concerning the plasma reserves.

Even so, he, your personal benefactor, _has_ changed more recently, driven to pore over his accounts and ponder what might be creating pain or harm or hardship, and how he might turn the wealth amassed in the name of the Sith to actually breaking the subtle chains woven through society. Funding a rehabilitation clinic on a relatively liberal planet to help those with both injuries and problems with intoxicants (and simultaneously conducting a calculated withdraw from associates who encourage his death and destruction.) Creating a fund to help average citizens in the sector with hardships, asking them only to contribute back when or if able. Scholarships and health research sponsorships from the amateur biologist. Evaluating policies that affect his employees and now he's developing care packages for cases of birth or death or sickness, and you, though part of his cocoon of wealth, have been taking part in this, personally turning a vacant floor of your building into a resource center and shelter for people fleeing from abuse or otherwise without a home. The Muun who tried to pass on the dictum of cruelty to you is finding a thrill in his hearts at these new small kindnesses, invited even without the parents' recognizing him to meet a child whose survival he had enabled by financing an hours long surgery.

Your birth planet and past should no longer hold horror for you and yet you resist accompanying him, instead saying you'll go with Qui-Gon, returning commodified orphaned Wookiees bought unwittingly by a business contact to Kashyyyk. And afterwards you stop over at Tatooine. Gardulla is humbled and shunned by the now free populace and yet evidently found a reason and means to stay on Tatooine. Shmi has a room and is doing minor doctoring (Fourdee's instruction, probably) and schooling, a matter that still requires attention, and the both of you are roped into relating more about the wider galaxy.

You do not think you would ever make a teacher and yet here you are with words that have formed much of one pivotal rung in Tatooine's climb to a freer, more just society than its tense and bloodstained past. About how there are wonders in the galaxy you have learned, and for as much hate as there is, lurking, there are people who can be kind around every corner, and, though you do not tell these children, your mind supplies the thought that instead of pursuing control over a people you all but loathed, you are master to no one, only one more voice (and one with power that may break chains) in a chorus for benevolent civilization. Damask had called your face friendly on your first meeting and perhaps it still is but more importantly, that does not seem a lie.

Here is the Hutt child (Huttling?), Harta, now mostly grown, rubbing shoulders with humans and free Twi'leks and every other child, protesting that frogs aren't disgusting, and searching up a video with those less fluent hands of infant birds. And Qui-Gon brings the school plants he has, for desert climates, and the children marvel and volunteer to contribute a few drops of their precious water to the care of this life.

You are obliged to step out into a subterranean hallway to take a comm call from Damask, all the way from Naboo, and he himself looks half-besotted over the news that Anakin is in love. "But you and I have been fine without that, I know, but he's delighted, my dear child." Now, _now_ , at fifty some years of age, nearly sixty, with Hego Damask more a father to you since age seventeen than Cosinga ever was, the childless Muun with well over a century behind him offhandedly calls you _his_ child. And it matters more to you, a quiet and slightly ambivalent ( _fifty._ ) thrill, than what you neglect to notice much these days, the vague humming and curious stalking, outside barriers in your mind, of the Force.

* * *

5.1 The task presently before us is to examine the results of movements within the star system on the surface of Naboo, and what role this plays in the planet's culture. Of course, the planet revolves on its axis while orbiting a star, as all do, and contrary to ancient notions, that orbit is not quite a perfect circle, although this fact is not indeed the cause of the seasons...

**nine**

You had expected Cosinga would die long before now, and most certainly never expected to be invited to his funeral, but Mina pled and enclosed a note from your still living mother (in near indecipherable hand) and dangled the prospect of seeing your numerous nieces and nephews before you. 

There are no brothers-in-law; Mina, naturally, divorced (though dating) and Sybil widowed, the twins have next to no preference for men between them, but evidently live side by side in an urban duplex in Theed with their wives. Your youngest brother brings only a teenage daughter who stands close beside him and holds his hand, but he embraces you readily, and so does she. Eberon is juggling a therapy textbook (there is only so much meddroids can do) along with his baby cousin, and Corinel, deferred from a lengthy trip, has her dog and her gear with her. They have little to no relationship with their grandparents. Your mother isn't visible in this group.

Then there is the funeral service itself.

It is no consolation to attend the man's funeral (there have been no reparations) and the Lake District has long been a terribly bittersweet place in your mind, irredeemable from the bad memories but sweetened by the good, and really, objectively, not so bad an environment. You are obliged (and so all the rest of the children, save your one brother, nearest in age, and very much drunk) to step out when the tribute speeches begin; you have no tolerance for the late man's political ambitions when they meant stepping ruthlessly on his own offspring.

But outside, not invited to the funeral, is Damask, with an armful of flowers, and Qui-Gon with an armful of cat, and Yan Dooku with open arms, only it seems there was no discussion with Hego about who could embrace you first and you are sandwiched between Muun and Serennoan and flowers and the cat decides to join in by leaping onto your shoulder, jamming a paw in and hitting your nose.

And your mother--she is old and will have precious few years left not under Cosinga's dominion, but before you stepped out she defied the dead man to acknowledge you as worthwhile, as "not our doing, really", but "a legacy I wish he had left".

"Perhaps this is the time to let you know you're my heir, for most purposes," Damask informs you, putting the fragrant bouquet in your arms. "I have--left much to charity, as I think you wish, and within the Banking Guild of course San has taken over my duties, but I have written up the will and have left you and the Skywalkers tidy sums and you charge of my holdings when I am no longer here."

You are not sure whether it is really decorous to announce such things at a funeral, and anyway you are in a tumalt of emotion returning here, over rejection, and the stark and forcibly rejected claim on your fate by the supernatural that happened here on Naboo, and yet also the looming prospect of having a blood related family again, in addition to the patchwork one you have found or made with Hego.

"It's not as if his death is imminent," Yan points out, putting an arm around your back now, and Damask ruffles your silvered hair as he started doing so long ago. The cat, Qui-Gon's cat, twines around your legs, and Mina walks around the corner with a tearful smile on her face. 

"I think it's safe to say you've made more of a good impact than he ever did," she says, and you embrace her and she you and this is the physical affection neither of you had much as children and being surrounded by people who do not wish to hurt you. 

The sun is setting, for Naboo tradition is that the final send-off occurs with the onset of night, but you are more interested in examining whether it does feel like the last vestiges of a yoke are off your shoulders, and exhaulting in this petty and victimless triumph over him, that for all he wished to be a powerful official, loved and feared, you are more beloved than he ever was, by a hundred or a thousand small kindnesses you overcame his example to give, by the decent people you have surrounded yourself with, and the only power you want is this ability to keep yourself and your family in comfort while helping people he (and you, once) would have never deigned to consider.

* * *

5.2 The night waxes after the summer solstice, the dark growing longer and longer, but in temperate climes it never does subsume the day...

**five (1)**

The galaxy, perhaps, is still not right. You meet Shmi Skywalker, in person, because the ship needs a tricky repair and you aren't willing to risk contaminating the atmosphere in the lifeless outer space, but also Plagueis and you decide to go for a drink.

And before you know it, you are using the words you know as weapons, learned in the charmless political theater of Naboo, against the injustices Hutts are perpetrating here. Humans oft see them as disgusting and they in turn have regarded your species as chattel (and now, counter to what you have thought your nature was, you have fanned that cosmopolitan citizenship, kinship with _worlds_ , into a flame. Not a brilliant one, no blazing star, but fire enough to warm against the night, storm enough to water and feed another)

And even proper unquestionable weapons, for they take so unkindly to sentient beings reclaiming their freedom that they inflict explosives upon them, and the two of you, some kind of Sith now all against the intent of Bane but all for the freedom, the elusive dynamic peace the son of a miner in wartime wanted, fight the guards.

But perhaps this is Damask's calling, for the rogue scientist reasons out quickly enough how to remove and disable such things ( _window gauze, conductive metal, yards of it, Lady Sidious_ (with a laugh), and he builds a temporary cage of an O.R. for the sake of freedom, for the sake of breaking chains) and he is sitting on the floor chatting with a toddler named Anakin Skywalker, brilliant, brilliant in the Force but probably more interesting to Damask for every other insight he lends, into life and wildlife on the world of the twin suns, even into childhood psychology.

Gardulla, who has called herself their owner, calls you a cheat and an enemy of Hutts, and you stand then sit before her, not disarmed, and break bread, or rather, some sort of cracker ration spread with an acrid sour-sweet condiment (you think the former is her, perhaps in some confusion, marking you as an associate of Muuns), and you are bold enough to be present in this room and say you have nothing against her person, only the actions that have led her to _own_ people. 

She sobs pitifully, and you sit dry-eyed, nibbling the food, which isn't your new favorite but is actually quite compelling after a couple bites, and think: _this is what I say it means to be Forceful and now to be Sith, what we ought to be, only power against powers, breaking chains of all like some universal solvent._

The sobs do dry up and you ask why she is here anyway, and what sort of thing she might do otherwise, than own slaves on a desert planet. You are firm, but not without sympathy, which somehow you can muster for anyone but Cosinga.

Gardulla doesn't have an answer, and it's not as if you gave her any, but she thanks you in a very small voice, anyway. 

There are twenty former slaves waiting for Fourdee to tend the scars of the surgery, and a crowd of more in Mos Espa, drinking water and sharing some sort of snack food. You accept a few pieces, but not much, not to take their food, and find it simple but pleasing. These people are not enough, but it is a beginning.

The galaxy is not all and everywhere right, but it is a little better than when the day began, and that was in turn incrementally better than the start of the day before it, and the two of you cannot provide all the help that is needed here, but maybe you can begin to help them help each other. 

The Force gives no real input on this matter, only a sort of subtle, neutral curiosity and the Jedi are absent here, but they have turned a blind eye to this slavery anyway, and the last thing they expect is Sith jetting about the galaxy, freeing slaves. (Even you hadn't expected to do that.)

**five (2)**

it is a week containing many surprises; you find Shmi Skywalker cooking in the galley of the _Defiant_ and the little boy Anakin carefully wiping down Fourdee while the droid chatters away and your impulse is to confront Plagueis about the intent of freeing slaves, only for him to return to the breakfast table from the 'fresher bemused and a little abashed and ruffle Anakin's sun-bleached hair before joining him in attending to the droid.

"I only wanted to make myself useful and Magister Damask said he had been eating ration bars exclusively," Shmi says and places steaming, fragrant plates of a sort of hash before you and Damask and then, with daring, putting two more down, one with a smaller portion spread out to cool, clearly for Anakin, and sitting down herself. Your impulse is to refuse; you have no intent of taking this much of her food or availing yourself of her labor without compensation, but it smells heavenly, and except perhaps one of the spices you recognize supplies in the galley.

"He does that," you say, and eat a forkful, and it is as wonderful as it smells and Plagueis is eating avidly when he isn't helping the little boy pour another glass of blue milk, and so this is a recipe you want to have, but you're not sure you'll ask for it yet. 

Later Damask discretely explains that Shmi isn't from Tatooine and wants Anakin to see more of the galaxy and have a better education than is readily available in Tatooine (that gives you pause for an instant, another thing someone should attend to) as well as try to find her family. And anyway, Anakin is a darling child and he doesn't really want to have to leave him behind for good.

Hego's half-sister, who deals in architectural supplies and travels extensively, is staying with Maul while you are gone with her brother, which is not probably an ideal arrangement and gives you pangs of hypocrisy, but there are also places that aren't good for children or situations where you do not wish to offer the enemies you make potential leverage. And "Aunt Ullé" is popular with the young Zabrak. 

But the very afternoon after you returned in the morning, you come back from shopping for new shirts for the growing boy only to find that there is an infant Hutt in your apartment with Maul. The Zabrak, over whom you have frequent pangs of guilt due to your inadequacy as a caregiver, at least seems to be pleased with the new playmate, but also Ullé hasn't departed yet and apparently both of Hego's father's wives have come by for a visit, and they are having a disagreement.

Perhaps the child is a little older than you thought, for it looks up at you with inhuman eyes that nevertheless convey the emotion of innocent adoration, and articulates with a little difficulty, likely both because of its youth and because Basic isn't optimized for Hutt vocal structures, "I Harta."

"Well," says Hego's mother, "I think you're making him altogether too emotional, but I don't have the xenophobic attitude that your nature is a problem."

"What kind of family is a teenaged human--" (inaccurate, you mentally comment, but to the average Muun humans under thirty or so might as well be underage, what with aging differently and not being familiar with human maturity) "and an infant Zabrak?" Caar's first wife asks.

Ullé hands you a flimsi printout asking you to please accept the company of Gardulla's "neice(?)", Harta, for the day while she makes a case against further slavery oriented investment on Tatooine by the Hutts, and you survey the scene, where Harta is feeling one of Maul's right-side horns and he is feeling the Hutt's skin, and three wealthy Muuns are disagreeing.

And you think of an answer to the rhetorical question, one you think Hego Damask has come round to, but which would shame Cosinga: _mine._

**Author's Note:**

> Phew well...that was a labor of love. I have no idea how long this is. 
> 
> Here are a few notes that came about when I was still writing part four
> 
> ...I feel like it's hard to mesh some of my space feelings with the GFFA hyperdrive concept. ( ~~I'm also wondering about the probable SMBH at its center?~~ )
> 
> Incidentally the impromptu soundtrack to four(1) is
> 
> Here Comes the Sun  
> Ne me quitte pas  
> Swans (Camera Obscura)


End file.
